Problems in dictionary making : the future

Transcription

1 Problems in dictionary making : the future by Paul PROCTER Longman House - GREAT BRITAIN 779

2 Problems in Dictionary Making : the future 1 wish to talk about the future of dictionary making and the problems that the future will bring, by reference to the past - that is to my ownexperiencein compiling dictionaries for two British publishers, William Collins and Longman Group. In considering the future 1 wish to do so first by talking about the dictionary as it will be and then by considering what the dictionary represents in a wider data-processing context, what use it is, and what it will do. The first 1 will cali the medium or the message and the meaning map, and the second the developing brain simulator. So first - the medium or the message. The medium has hitherto been taken for granted. It is a book or several books in a set. The alternatives to the book are first of ail suggested by the machinery used to create the book - the computer. This is the obvious road - it is by no means the only one. 1 would Iike to survey the alternatives and to do so by gradually adding components to a circuit diagram which 1 shal draw on the blackboard. 1 will make reference to advantages that different media will give to different kinds of dictionary user. To the seeker of phonological information, the book is patently unsuitable - an artificial deformation of the medium to ask it to provide sounds. No. Here we must have Immediate spoken forms with regional or national variations. Possibly a transcribed form will be a useful back-up. So here the technology available suggests a loudspeaker and a keyboard, with an optiqnal screen. 1 will draw this on the board: LOUDSPEAKER KEYBOARD D no U G G OOQ~G~ O~~CO~ Phonological model (passive) weil This is of course a totally passive form and perhaps we should look at introducing another known electronic component, the microphone. 781

3 MICROPHONE VOICE Phonological model (active) What will this do?. weil it will enable language produced by the dictionary user to be analysed by electronic means, tested for adequacy, accept or rejected, systematically corrected, and so on. The screen might help here in giving visual representation of the ideal to be achieved and the attempt made to achieve that ideal. 1 will cali this phonological error analysis. So much for phonology.! How about syntax. Here again the book fails badly. It offers at a rudimentary level parts of speech, at a somewhat more sophisticated level verb patterns, syntactic coding - features found in English monolingual dictionaries designed for the foreign learner of English. What does the seeker after syntax want. He wants to know how a particular word-form, when used in a particular meaning, behaves in sentences.' He will need a keyboard of course to key in the word - he will want to see alternative meanings listed - he will want to select one and find out about its behaviour. 1 would like to give him access to other words which behave similarly (if he wants them). Certainly we must now have a screen and it must have colour and graphics, and movement. COLOUR SCREEN : fi \ WORDS AND PICTURES : MOVEMENT \ i) Syntactic model (passive) As with the phonological model, this is a passive form. What is required in a teaching dictionary is an interactive syntax analyser that will reject the unacceptable and query dubious \:lsages. The picture now looks Iike this : 782

4 LOUDSPEAKER KEYBOARD SCREEN (( )) VOICE SYNTAX 1 would like for a brief moment to wander away from the model 1 am building up to talk about what the wires (which conveniently go off the edge of my diagram) are connected to. Weil crudei y, we have two functions provided, storage and processing, which 1 shall connect up now. Whether these are local or central is at present irrelevant : 1 1 STO~AGE 1 PROCESSING Coming back to the dictionary, 1 will move on to semantics or what 1 referred to at the beginning of my talk as the meaning map. Semantics is the primary area of description whether monolingual, bilingual or multilingual. What do we want here? For the concrete world we must have pictures and our screen will provide that. Moving pictures will open up ail sorts of possibilities. We shall use movement for verbs and prepositions. Because a whole range of contexts will be able to be shown in close sequence, the major disadvantage of over-specificity in pictures in a book will be avoided and this will massively extend the range of pictorial illustration in describing language. Ali kinds of nouns 783

5 and adjectives will benefit from this. So much for the concrete world. How about the abstracto Weil here language has to be relied upon to describe language. Contexts, example sentences, translations and synonyms will ail be readily available through our keyboard. These will ail be optionally supported by the spoken voice. But can't we offer something better than this? Weill believe so. 1 believe that the lexicographer, the mapper of language, will be able to become a cartographer of language in the far future. The multidimensional nature of meaning makes graphie representation, which is often attempted through such devices as matrices, an ideal to be sought after - provided that the graphies are sophisticated enough. If we look at words for love, for example, we find a number of parameters in which variation can occur. Intensity might distinguish Iiking from love, but sexuality may be one component, while relative strength of non-sexual feeling another. Subservience is a component in adoration and devotion, which also vary in the parameter of intensity as with Iiking and love. Desire and passion are strongly sexual, perhaps equivalent in terms of intensity, but the latter having a love component which the former may lack. Presenting these complexities in two-dimension graphies - on the contexts in which they may occur. has so far defeated Iinguists. 1 believe that they could be mapped through techni ques adopted from cartography. The use of colour and movement will highlight appropriate features to give a visual representation of abstract meaning. If this is the direction in which the dictionary may develop, 1 should like to ask the question, what will this new dictionary do, in the practi~al world? Dictionaries are already a major resource on a hidden technical level and will become so increasingly. They stand behind the hyphenation programmes of automatic printing devices, support the first real attempts at machine translation, are a component of voice recognition and synthesis systems, are essential to optical character recognition, and are an essential component of any concept of artificial intelligence. The growing practice of robotics which is now gathering momentum will cali upon lexicographers or their equivalents to provide the data through which linguistic comparisons can be made, in the creation of, interpretation of and response to natural human language. 1 for one regard these developments with excitement and enthusiasm. This is what 1 would describe as lexicography's role in the creation of the developing brain simulator. 784